Semiconductor wafers continue to grow in size. Presently the largest wafers are 300 mm. Once the wafers have been etched with circuitry they are thinned. These thinned wafers are extremely fragile and each wafer can easily be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Transporting these wafers from the clean room processing area to the non-clean room slicing and dicing and packaging part of the factory requires a container. Present containers have several limitations. For instance, none of the present containers allow for a batch transfer of wafers from one carrier to another carrier. Present designs all require moving each wafer one at a time. Present containers take up a substantially amount of space when not in use. These limitations significantly reduce the usefulness of present wafer shipping containers.
Thus there exists a need for a wafer shipping container that allows batch transfer of wafers and that does not take up a lot of space when they are not in use.